Chapter 3b: Some interludes

After I made that last call to the remisier (stock broker), I went out to get a ream of foolscap paper. When I returned I found the girl, Mandy Lopez, waiting on the landing outside my room. She stepped from out of the shadows that shrouded the landing. It was creepy. Her grin was feral yet inviting. She scratched her crotch slowly. It was vulgar and at the same time erotic. She was sixteen and vulpine. She was a nasty brat with a perpetual bad attitude and spent most of the time quarrelling noisily with her aunt or going out with her nasty little boyfriends until the early hours of the morning. Nonetheless she was a very sexual person. I would be lying if I said she did not turn me on but at that moment my mind wasn't on sex.

She had a whole stable of boyfriends but there was one particular creep, a Chindian (a person of Chinese-Indian descent — Malaysian slang) known as Vincent Liew a.k.a. Kalinga Chai (Tamil Boy) who would take her out to parties and bring her home way past midnight. Then the row between aunt and niece would begin. I could hear them even from the third floor.

Mandy glided forward to me and stood there with one hip thrown forward. Her shorts were form fitting and outlined her mound clearly even to the parting. Physically there was nothing under-developed about her. Mentally? I would rather not say.

"Hi, Mandy. What's on your mind now?" I asked cautiously.

Sixteen-year-old girls were dangerous to fool with and this one was just a little more dangerous than usual. I could bite her and make her forget, but then it could easily become a habit. One bite would lead to another and before you could say gnash I would have a teenaged vampire on my hands. She was beautiful but, at the time, I just didn't like the idea of dining on her.

"Nothing, Mr. Kaid. Just hanging in," she replied. She stared at me looking like a bad imitation of a cinema vamp, the kind that has the hero falling all over himself to please her while she is getting them into all kinds of impossible situations. If she stopped acting like a tart she would be even more attractive. Her manners and her approach to life made her appear to be just another low class girl — ill-mannered, a little uncouth and loud. Circumstances had moulded her character. She was what she had become because her environment made her so. It was a choice of fitting in and be one of the predators or end up a victim. I could sympathise with her and, despite the almost comical way she was coming on to me, I felt just a little sad for her. In the end she, too, was one of the victims of circumstances. I decided to put her off — at least for the moment.

I said to her quietly but firmly, "Better wait downstairs. Your aunt doesn't like it a bit if you hang round my door. She tends to screech a lot, in case you hadn't noticed."

The girl grinned ferociously at me. She had very white even teeth. She stopped scratching herself and began picking her nose instead absentmindedly. I made a face. She looked at me steadily with eyes as knowing as a much older woman's.

"Aunt Philo's gone to Port Dickson for the weekend. Won't be back till Sunday, I bet. Fucking her head off with Ollie. That's her boyfriend. Saw them going off in his car. Gave me fifty bucks to buy food for myself."

"You really got a bad mouth, kid. Talking bad about your aunt and all that. You shouldn't use that F word anyway," I said piously.

"What F word?" she jeered. "Oh, you mean the FUCK word. So what? Fuck is fuck. Maybe you don't know how to fuck."

Clearly she was throwing a challenge at me. She was coming on hard but the crudeness of her approach put me off. I have seen Indian peasant women with more finesse. It wasn't that I was getting my share of nooky. Sex wasn't a problem since I mainly targeted females. I got fed and I got laid. She was a beautiful girl and sexy as hell, but the manner in which she offered herself was tawdry and just a little desperate. She approached sex with the subtlety of a crocodile lunging at its prey by the riverside.